Solana Co-Founder Vibe Codes Hyperliquid Rival, Invites Devs to ‘Steal Idea’

Crypto users earlier today spotted Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko uploading code on Github for what appeared to be his own decentralized perpetual futures exchange, leading to mass speculation that a new Hyperliquid competitor could be coming to Solana.

But Yakovenko has since poured cold water on the idea, clarifying that he was just “messing around” with the AI tool Claude and made the repo on Github public by accident. Still, he’s urging other developers to “steal the idea” and run with it.

Perpetual futures are all the rage right now in crypto following the rise of Hyperliquid—a cryptocurrency network and decentralized exchange that specializes in perpetual futures, or perps. More recently, other competing perp DEXs have entered the fray, such as Avantis and Aster. While Aster is available on multiple networks, its presence is largest on the Binance-connected BNB Chain, and it has at times over the last couple months gone head to head with Hyperliquid in terms of trading volume and revenue generated.

And while there are a couple of Solana perp DEXs out there, nothing on the network yet rivals Hyperliquid or Aster. That’s why Solana hopefuls were seemingly so enthralled by the idea of Solana’s co-founder developing his own. Yakovenko’s would-be perps DEX, dubbed Percolator, was supposedly “implementation-ready” and would have launched as a self-custodial “sharded” exchange, according to the code posted on GitHub.

But that’s apparently all moot, since, as Yakovenko has said, he was just messing around with AI and never meant for the code to be public.

Perpetual futures, though, are huge business in crypto. These derivatives contracts allow traders to gamble on the direction of an asset—called a “long” or “short”—without being required to own the underlying asset. Often, the trading method is combined with leverage, which has become a point of competition for exchanges. Aster, for example, offers a dizzying 1,001x leverage on Bitcoin, a significant jump from Hyperliquid’s 40x.

However, some experts recently warned that the competition over leverage could be creating systemic risk within the markets. The warning came shortly after $19 billion worth of leveraged crypto positions got rekt in under 24 hours just over a week ago. It was the largest such liquidation event in crypto history, according to data from CoinGlass.

Experts told Decrypt last week it was the result of a liquidation cascade worsened by high levels of leverage, something that may become more commonplace with the rise of perp DEXs. Proponents of the products, though, argue that exchanges are simply giving traders what they want. 

It’s that level of interest in perps that explains the reaction to Yakovenko’s leaked code. “Make one repo public on accident and the whole world goes nuts,” he posted on X in response.

That didn’t stop Solana degens from speculating on Percolator’s price. A meme coin launched on Pump.fun, named after the GitHub page, soared to a $6.23 million market capitalization before the Solana co-founder pushed back. It has since crashed 79%, in typical meme coin fashion, to $1.28 million.

“If your chain founder isn’t vibe coding perps DEXs on the side, it’s time to look for a new chain,” Helius Labs founder Mert Mumtaz wrote on X.